“I’ll say,” murmured Laura. “The biggest one being that roughly half of what he said makes no sense whatsoever.”
Tanner frowned. “Was I unclear? Should I go over it again?”
Smith shook his head. “No, you were perfectly coherent, Mr. Reiz. It’s just that the confluence of events you experienced today are as bizarre as they are disturbing.” He rapped his notepad against his knee. “To begin with, you were quite adamant that in the revenant memories you’ve been recalling since this morning, at least one of your past lives is repeatedly referred to as ‘Merlin.’”
“To be frank,” Tanner said, “I was hesitant to mention that, because it sounds nuts. I extensively studied Merlin as a mythical figure during my graduate coursework. I was kind of worried my concussed brain got confused during my revenance and…” He looked from Smith to Laura, both of whom wore uncomfortable expressions. “That’s not why you’re concerned, is it?”
“No.” Smith stopped tapping his notepad. “We’re concerned because, logically, you can’t be the latest revenant of Merlin, as we’ve already identified your brother as such.”
“What?” Tanner drew his brows together. “How can that be? Can a revenant soul split in half to accommodate identical twins?”
“Before today, I would’ve said no,” Laura replied. “I’ve read many papers on the phenomenon of revenance, and twins have been studied several times. In all cases, the soul defaults to one twin after the splitting of the zygote. There’s never been a recorded case of a soul splitting along with the zygote.”
“So, what?” Tanner said. “Saul and I are some kind of freak accident?”
“That remains to be seen,” Smith answered. “And we’ll have to put that topic on the backburner for now. We have more-pressing issues.”
“The necromancer.” Tanner wrung his hands. “He and that woman are clearly planning to do something bad with, ah, Excalibur.”
“You think it’s the real Excalibur?” Laura asked Smith.
“I’m certain it’s the real deal.” Smith tucked his pen and notepad away and picked up the NSPSA packet. “No necromancer skilled enough to construct a manticore would fool around with fake relics. There’s a dangerous dark magic ritual in the works, and if it wasn’t for Mr. Reiz’s brush with the forces of fate, we wouldn’t have found out about it until it went off.”
He rose from his chair, and thunder sounded in the distance. “I know it was difficult for you to recount all those terrible things, Mr. Reiz, and I am very grateful that you gave it your best effort. You’ve been a big help.”
He made for the door but kept talking. “When you’re feeling better—and the city is not on the brink of disaster—we can work out what’s going on with you and your brother regarding the revenance matter. Until then, please rest and recuperate. When you’re ready to go home, I’ll have a security detail accompany you to ensure that neither Muntz nor this necromancer have another chance to harm you.”
With that, he stormed into the hall, sparks crackling at his heels.
Tanner waited until Smith was out of earshot before he said, “Do you think the city is really on the brink of disaster?”
Laura shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Saul
They were two miles out from the Castle when Adeline received the text. Saul had the car idling at a stoplight, the windshield wipers squeaking as they scrubbed away the rain some god was still wringing from the clouds. He started slightly at the ding from Adeline’s phone and watched her unlock the screen to peruse the message.
The light turned green, and as Saul tapped the accelerator, he asked, “Got some good news?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” she said. “The police located the van Muntz used to abduct your brother. It’s in the back lot of a closed convenience store on Monarch. Couple uniforms are staking it out now, and it looks like Don and Drew are getting ready to torch it.”
Saul tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “And? We’re not on that case anymore. Cassidy’s team caught it.”
“According to the little birdie who tipped me off,” she said, referring to her carefully cultivated network of office chatterboxes, “Cassidy’s team has a few administrative threads to tie up before they shelve their Hartford case.”
“What’s your point?”
She tapped her phone against her thigh. “Even if they wrap up that stuff immediately, it’ll take them several minutes to grab their gear, get to their car, and set off for the convenience store. By the time they arrive, the van might be burned to a crisp and the douchebag brothers long gone.”
“So what?” he asked, jerking the car into the left lane to pass a slow-moving minivan. “You want to disobey Roland’s orders and go beat the crap out of Don and Drew before they have a chance to scuttle off to whatever roach-infested squat Muntz is occupying this week?”
“I didn’t say we had to get brutal,” she countered. “But I would recommend you get even. You’ve practically had steam coming out of your ears since your brother landed in the infirmary. If you don’t blow any of that off, you’re going to blow a gasket. Probably when we’re in the middle of something more important than rounding up a couple mooks.”
“What happened to justice being preferable to vengeance?”
Adeline gave him a bland look. “You have the observation skills of a cantaloupe, Reiz. At what point did I agree with everyone else in Roland’s office?”
Saul thought about it for a second. “You didn’t. You kept quiet.”
“Yeah, I did.” She pointed her phone at an upcoming turnoff for a road that led straight to Monarch Street. “Because as noble a notion as justice is, sometimes a little vengeance is good for the soul. If you never taste the satisfaction of getting back at somebody for wronging you, resentment can grow like a tumor, until it crushes everything else that matters.”
“I’m not sure Roland, Jack, and Jill would agree with you.”
“Roland, Jack, and Jill are all goody-two-shoes through and through. We aren’t.”
Saul glanced at the turnoff and then at the roof of the nearby Castle poking up over the rest of the buildings in the area. He sucked in a sharp breath of indecision—and jerked the wheel to the right, turning the car onto Mission Road. “We’re going to get in big trouble for this.”
“Only if we get caught.”
“Jack can literally smell guilt.”
She snorted. “Then don’t feel guilty about it.”
“How can I not?” He smacked the steering wheel in frustration. “You’re making a hypocrite out of me.”
“Excuse me?” She pinched his arm. “You’re not my puppet. You’re a grown man with free will making his own damn decisions.”
He winced at the ache in his bicep. “But you’re tempting me to break my word.”
“Firstly, temptation is not the same as control,” she said. “Secondly, you didn’t sound at all sincere when you ‘agreed’ that it was wrong to pursue vengeance back in the big man’s office. A profoundly deaf and legally blind geriatric with dementia would’ve noticed you were lying through your teeth. Thirdly, you didn’t technically tell anyone else not to pursue vengeance, then turn right around and pursue it yourself. So, the way I see it, you’re just a shitty liar, not a hypocrite.”
“Wow, Ade,” he drawled, “that makes me feel so much better.”
She rolled her eyes. “Will you just get us to the convenience store before Don and Drew turn the van into a smoking pile of ash?”
“Sure. One speeding ticket, coming up.”
He slammed his foot on the pedal, and the car rocketed down the street. Luckily, between the storm and the waning daylight, traffic had thinned considerably. So Saul only came within inches of crashing at seventy miles per hour a handful of times, and the motorists whose cars he almost totaled only yelled a handful of obscenities.
He slowed the car at the yellow light of the intersection that con
nected to Monarch but coasted on through, weaving between a tractor-trailer struggling to turn on the narrow streets and a pickup truck that made a left without checking for oncoming traffic. The space between those two vehicles was just enough to fit the car, and Adeline recoiled from her window when the side mirror of the truck nearly punched through it.
“Be careful, will you?” she screeched.
“I can be fast and reckless, or slow and careful,” he replied, pulling the car into the left lane so they could more easily survey the lot of the store up ahead. “I haven’t taken one of those defensive driving courses for preternatural car chases yet, so I still have to level up before I can unlock my ‘fast and furious’ option.”
She scowled at him. “Very funny.”
“What? Didn’t you ever play racing games when you were growing up?”
“No,” she said coldly. “I played with dead things.”
That shut him up, and he pointedly looked away from her.
As the car sailed on by the convenience store, Saul caught a glimpse of a van parked in the back lot, underneath a metal canopy, between the rusty outlines where two rows of gas pumps had once been. Two men in leather jackets were dousing the vehicle inside and out with what was likely gasoline, stored in a couple of red plastic cans with yellow spouts.
Saul drove half a block past the convenience store and parked in the nearly empty lot of a KFC. Cutting the engine, he asked, “How do you want to play this?”
Adeline blew air through her teeth. “Let’s split up. I go around one side. You go around the other. You take down Don and Drew with your best magic kung-fu. I hang back in case they’ve got an ace up their sleeves. Once you subdue them, I play guard while you search the van.”
“What about the cops? They still hanging around?”
“Since Jack warned them to steer clear, they set up their stakeout a few blocks away. They won’t be able to see much of anything out of the ordinary. As long as you don’t blow up the store.”
“I won’t.” He held up his hand. “Scout’s honor.”
Adeline barked out a laugh. “You, a Boy Scout? That’s almost as funny as imagining you as a professor.”
Saul ignored the slight, opened his door, and emerged into the faint drizzle of the dwindling storm. The smell of fried chicken hung heavy in the air, making his stomach rumble. But since he hadn’t had much luck with food today, he ignored the temptation to grab a bucket of original recipe before he marched off to confront Don and Drew.
He was fairly sure he wouldn’t throw up in the process of subduing those two morons, but it was best not to risk it. If he showed any sign of weakness to the idiot brothers, they’d paper the town with metaphorical fliers proclaiming that Saul Reiz’s rough-and-tough exterior was all for show. And in the future, Saul would have a much harder time dealing with other preternatural criminals.
Nonhuman preternaturals listened to humans only when humans held their respect, and the only way to gain their respect was to appear more powerful than them.
They took to signs of weakness like piranhas took to raw meat.
Adeline and Saul trudged across the street and came up on the convenience store from beneath the moldy awning of the pawn shop next door. The lots were separated by a scraggly hedge, so they ducked and shimmied across the gap to avoid putting themselves in view of anyone in the back lot.
Past the hedge, they hurried over to the front of the store, then went their separate ways. Saul headed left, and Adeline right, both of them creeping along the front wall of the building until they reached the corners.
Saul peeked around his corner and spied nothing of concern—Don and Drew never took the time to set up defensive wards, mostly because they sucked at building wards—so he shot Adeline the hand signal that said the coast was clear. She returned his gesture with an identical one, and they peeled around opposite sides of the building at the same time.
As Saul approached the back lot, the sound of splashing liquid grew louder and louder, and the occasional grunt of effort resolved over the fading din of the rain. At the next corner, Saul plastered himself to the dirt-streaked cinderblock wall, slid a small rectangular mirror off his belt, and extended it past the edge of the wall.
The mirror reflected a slightly warped version of the scene in the back lot: Don and Drew emptying the last drops of gasoline from the two cans onto the ground around a plain white van with rusty wheel wells and tires whose treads had worn out in the early nineties.
Saul watched the brothers toss the plastic gas cans aside and listened to them argue about who should light the fire. Don complained that the last time he’d burned evidence of one of the boss’s crimes, the initial flash had singed his eyebrows. Drew countered by claiming that he wasn’t adept enough at fire spells to cast one in the rain, so the responsibility had to fall on Don’s shoulders.
Unable to come to a compromise, the brothers decided to flip a coin to decide who had to risk self-immolation this time around.
Saul waited until the quarter left Don’s thumb. Then he lurched around the corner, one hand raised, and muttered one of his best incapacitating spells.
Electricity danced across his tongue, zipped down to his fingers, and shot outward in a crooked bolt of lightning. The bolt struck the ground five feet away from the idiot brothers, who’d been too absorbed by the spinning quarter to notice they were about to get their asses fried.
They reacted only when their eyes caught the flash of the striking bolt, and reflexively shouted grounding counterspells. But they cast too slowly. The electricity surged out of the slick concrete and zinged up their legs.
The jolt threw Drew against the side of the van, while Don spun out and crashed headfirst into one of the yellow concrete bollards that had been erected to stop crazy drivers from ramming into the gas pumps. Drew rebounded off the side of the van and landed in the puddle of gasoline, hissing as the volatile liquid splashed into his eyes. Don’s head bounced off the pole, and he landed with a dull thud on his back, groaning in pain. Blood gushed out of a ragged gash that stretched all the way across his forehead.
Saul didn’t give the idiot brothers the opportunity to recover. He wove another spell, this one bitter in his mouth, and hissed the incantation into the cool, damp air.
For a brief moment, the air stilled, the wind hushed, the drizzle stalled, and a burning cold that had nothing to do with the waning storm crept across the lot. Then time righted itself, and as the rain resumed, ice crackled to life from the puddles it had formed in the potholes of the lot. The ice snaked across the concrete and enveloped Don and Drew like straitjackets, pinning their arms and legs in place.
Both men possessed enough magic strength to break the ice, but doing so would take them time they did not have.
Saul was already there, beneath the sagging metal canopy. Frost on his fingertips. Fury in his heart. “I think the three of us have some things we need to discuss,” he said on a puff of white air, “regarding a certain kidnap job the two of you performed this morning.”
Drew blinked his bloodshot eyes to clear them of the gas and looked up, finally realizing just what depth of shit he’d waded into. “Reiz?” he said fearfully. “How the hell did you escape from the sable wight?”
Saul was taken aback. “What sable wight?”
Drew squinted in confusion, iridescent tears streaming from the corners of his eyes. “Uh, the sable wight we set on you at the factory?”
It hit Saul then, what awful truth Drew was implying. The sable wight that had been reported near the Karthen Street Bridge, the one Berkowitz and Romano had been assigned to wrangle…that creature’s appearance on the same day as Tanner’s kidnapping hadn’t been sheer coincidence. The wight had been part of Muntz’s plan to get revenge on Saul.
Frankly, a sable wight, a rare but naturally occurring creature that lived in abandoned buildings, was far more Muntz’s style than a manticore, an undead monster impossible for anyone other than a highly skilled necromancer to
create.
Wights were easy to lure into magic traps. They were easy to hold inside those traps for lengthy periods. And they were easy to sic on your enemies when the time was right.
Wights were also extremely effective killing machines, and they were insatiable. Once they got a taste for someone, they wouldn’t stop until they consumed that person or died trying.
Death by sable wight was also far crueler than death by manticore. The sensation of having your life force slowly consumed was worse than any pain, and it instilled in the victim feelings of melancholy so intense that some people were driven to suicide rather than self-defense.
Saul had been fed on by a sable wight exactly once, during a missing persons case five years ago. He’d had nightmares every night for six months afterward, and sometimes, they still came back to haunt him.
Today, Tanner had been through that same experience—Muntz had fed him to a sable wight like a fucking steak—and Tanner hadn’t even known what was happening to him.
Saul felt sick again, but this time, he had nothing to purge. So instead, he funneled his nausea into his rising rage and growled, “That wasn’t me!”
“Huh?” Don mumbled, his entire face now covered in a garish bloody mask. “What wasn’t you?”
“The person you kidnapped this morning,” Saul said. “That wasn’t me. That was my twin brother, my mundane brother. Who, until you chuckleheads tortured him half to death, didn’t even have the Sight.”
Don and Drew gawped at him, uncomprehending, as the words slowly sank into their minds. When the understanding finally clicked into place, they both went very pale and very still.
“W-We…” Don stammered. “We didn’t know you had a brother. Much less an identical twin. If we’d known, we’d have—”
“You would’ve done whatever Muntz told you to do,” Saul snapped. “And let’s face it. He probably would’ve told you to grab my brother anyway. Because as much as he wants me dead and gone, he wants me to suffer all the more. Ed Muntz is a cold, vindictive son of a bitch who has no problem killing innocent people. As evidenced by the fact he burned an eighteen-year-old girl to death this morning. A teenage girl!”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 20